I’ve been on the defender side of security my whole career.
I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
You were not born in eastern Europe that’s why. That’s the whole Eastern European mind set - the only way to succeed is to rip people off or scam. Anything else is already taken or no money in it or government will take it away from you.
> those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.
The fuck, i walk past the office of mirhosting every day
We should note these are not even slightly legitimate hosting companies, lest anyone worry too much about their non-KYC offshore servers. These aren't hosting companies that ask little, they are just directly front companies for Russian intelligence, owned by members of Russian intelligence, they don't do anything else, they don't provide hosting service to regular people even if you want it (I have tried).
Unlike in Germany where I lost several social media accounts because my email service provider (pissmail) went to jail because someone signed up for his service and sent spam.
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
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This is the email that I received, after I mistyped my credit card data, when creating an account on Hetzner Cloud. You don't have to be a big cloud company to enforce the KYC rules to defend against fraud.
I wonder how big/small wa pissmail? Would be good to know where is the threshold of sanity:
1. staying with smaller providers is cheaper (and you usually get non-AI customer support)
2. at the risk of stepping into something that makes you lose your data (like you did)
Maybe don't use any German service you can't afford to lose. Their government hates the tech industry, no matter how much it sings its praises. Same government just labeled watermelons as illegal antisemitism, btw.
When I was learning some homelab stuff, and was setting up pfSense, I was able to see the geos of all the scans/attacks on my home internet IP. I was surprised to see that Netherlands was up there with Russia and China in volume. They all got geo blocked.
What is it about the Netherlands that makes them so attractive to these people?
Amsterdam is one of the biggest (perhaps the biggest) global internet hubs - European equivalent of North Virginia - and also not a totalitarian country like Germany (otherwise there'd be more in Frankfurt).
I see couple of issues here:
> 1) "Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers" - this should not have happened. Full stop. It's not US, UK or even DE. We are losing, people.
> 2) They did not turn those into "honey pots". meaning: they did not want a fix. They wanted a show.
> 3) I bet it's just a tip of an iceberg. Care to assume how many of those are hosted at "major cloud providers"? Money talks ...
Now can we also seize some servers for the massive organized DDOS campaign that seems to be plaguing many small hosts lately or are the originators too big for that?
26 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] threadjarvis, whats the status of my dutch servers
I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
Same reason for CIA and NSA engineers.
The fuck, i walk past the office of mirhosting every day
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
Unlike in Germany where I lost several social media accounts because my email service provider (pissmail) went to jail because someone signed up for his service and sent spam.
I'm sorry this happened to you.
After reviewing your updated customer information, we have decided to deactivate your account because of some concerns we have regarding this information. Therefore, we have cancelled all your existing products and orders with us.
Best regards
Your Hetzner Online Team
---
This is the email that I received, after I mistyped my credit card data, when creating an account on Hetzner Cloud. You don't have to be a big cloud company to enforce the KYC rules to defend against fraud.
I wonder how big/small wa pissmail? Would be good to know where is the threshold of sanity:
1. staying with smaller providers is cheaper (and you usually get non-AI customer support)
2. at the risk of stepping into something that makes you lose your data (like you did)
What is it about the Netherlands that makes them so attractive to these people?
Would have loved to read that article.